I Think, Therefore I Blog

How I used Facebook

As I’m sure most people know, Facebook is fairly handy. You can keep tabs on what your friends are doing now, stay in touch with old friends, and even have a laugh at their expense. I joined Facebook in November 2006 for just those reasons. I thought it was cool at first, but it became an addiction. For about a month, it was all I could do. I spent hours perusing profiles and tagging everyone I knew. It took a while, but I got it under control.

I updated my profile a few times a day. I tagged a few photos that a friend uploaded. I occasionally updated some of my personal information. After a while, though, I began to find that things were getting pretty repetitive. Dedicated, I stuck with it. About a year later, Applications were born. I thought they were cool, too. Soon, they too became enormous time-wasters, especially with them getting more and more pathetic. I was still a fan of the social networking site, but there was a problem. My Inbox was constantly being infiltrated by ridiculous invitations to play Scrabble, battle fish or some other odd thing, or become a Vampire. I don’t want to become a Vampire. Not when I’m online simply trying to escape from daily stress. Save it for World of Warcraft.

I had had enough. About a week ago, I came to a sudden realization. Facebook is stupid. I hardly used it to communicate with people anymore, as anyone I cared to talk to was an ‘Enter’ away on MSN. I found that I was only going on Facebook because I had the account. I felt obligated to update my status or see what my friends were doing simply because I could. That didn’t seem right to me. In my opinion, the whole point of social networking is the desire to widen your circle of friends. I no longer had the same desires as that Sunday afternoon back in 2006.

Needless to say, I’m no longer a user. There may come a time when I miss clicking through the profiles of people I’ll never see again, the walls that I’ll never write on, the status updates I’ll never take seriously, the invites that I’ll never read, but I doubt it. The whole site has lost some of its credibility, I think. It was fun while it lasted, but it’s over, and I think I’m better off without it.

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3 thoughts on “How I used Facebook”

Great video. I’ve only been with Facebook a couple months, but agree that it can certainly lead to a lot of time wasting. One thing I don’t like is there’s not much incentive to share with others as there is with a weblog. A status update is nothing compared to saying how you felt about Obama being elected, to say nothing of the meaning of life. Facebook is really quite superficial when you think about it. I decided last night that I prefer the people who visit my blog over my “friends” on Facebook. Call me crazy…